Why Women Shouldn’t Have to Act Like Dudes at Work | The Atlantic (July 27): “The reason for women leaving is the absence of feeling valued.” Interview with Barbara Annis, founder of the Gender Intelligence Group, “a consultancy that works with executives at major firms (…) to create strategies to transform their work cultures into ones that are friendly to both men and women.”

Why Do People Hate Fangirls? | Laci Green (July 17): “Confession: All the practice I got before my first kiss happened with a giant backstreet boys poster taped to the back of my door in 1999. And I regret nothing!” Laci Green explains what’s wrong with hating fangirls.

Black Girls Rock: A look at Fierce, Feminist Women in Film | The Mary Sue (July 27): “It’s not enough to be the token friend, or the one Halle Berry in a sea of Regina Kings, or the sassy comic relief like Leslie Jones’s brief appearance in Trainwreck. We are beautiful and unique, and we deserve to be heard. That’s why I put together a list of amazing women in film roles that showcase black women as more than just the limited caricatures we are constantly bombarded with in mainstream media. This is your friendly reminder that black girls rock.”

Waiting for Captain Marvel is getting old | Feministing (July 28): “When Marvel announced the Black Panther and Captain Marvel movies, I was among those cheering. Finally, a superhero film that centered a person of color and a woman. The reality, however, is that those films aren’t coming until 2018. In the meantime, we have to wait and watch films like Ant-Man invoke some sort of pseudo-feminist-women-are-badass-but-still-need-protecting message. Frankly, I may not make it until 2018.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

It’s been a sad day for many of us in the Geek Feminism community, as we process the news of Nóirín Plunkett’s passing.

Nóirín was a powerful force for positive change. We have lost a tremendous collaborator and friend, and they will be deeply missed.

Words are challenging in the face of a loss like this one; many thanks to those who have written in memoriam of Nóirín thus far.

The Apache Foundation: “Throughout Nóirín’s time at the Foundation she was an Apache httpd contributor, ASF board member, VP and ApacheCon organizer. Nóirín’s passionate contributions and warm personality will be sorely missed. Many considered Nóirín a friend and viewed Nóirín’s work to improving ‘Women in Technology’ as a great contribution to this cause.”

The Ada Initiative: “Nóirín will be remembered as a leading open source contributor; brilliant and compassionate and welcoming and funny. They were a long time leader in the Apache Software Foundation community, and a gifted speaker and documentation writer. Nóirín was key to the creation of the Ada Initiative in more ways than one. Since then they made invaluable contributions to the Ada Initiative as an advisor since February 2011, and a project manager in 2014. We are more grateful than we can say.”

Sumana Harihareswara: “When I was volunteering on the search for the Ada Initiative’s new Executive Director, I worked closely with Nóirín and could always count on their wisdom, compassion, and diligence. I am so grateful, now, that I had a chance to collaborate with them — I had hoped to work with them again, someday, in some organization or other. One of the last times I saw them, they were crying with happiness over the passage of the Irish same-sex marriage referendum. I don’t want to end this entry because there is no ending that can do justice to them.”

Rich Bowen: “Nóirín’s motto was Festina Lente – Hasten Slowly, and this embodies her approach to life. She considered things carefully, and rushed to get things done, because life is too short to get everything accomplished that we put our minds to. In the end, hers was far, far too short.”

TODO Group And Open Source Codes of Conduct | Model View Culture: “We’ve come up with some pretty great resources and tools, put them into practice, tested and iterated, and built community consensus. Yet TODO swoops in to erase and replace all of this work: without our consent or input, a group of massive companies with practically unlimited funds are branding and pushing a code of conduct that suits their needs, not ours.”

Managers beware of gender faultlines | EurekAlert! Science News: “In addition to gender divisions, the authors looked at a more benign kind of faultline: Those created by cliques centered on job types (that is, when people with similar job duties share not only that trait but other demographic qualities such as gender, age and time served.) When the diversity environment was positive, that kind of group identity actually led to stronger feelings of loyalty toward the firm. But the positive effect of job-function cliques disappeared when the diversity climate was unsatisfactory.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

25 Ways To Dress Like A Tech Employee | Buzzfeed: “There’s a persistent stereotype that people who work with technology are all dudes in hoodies or free company t-shirts, with zero interest in personal style or fashion. We see it in everything from Microsoft ad campaigns to the way tech companies are shown in television and movies. In my experience, I’ve worked with many people who are just as interested in style as they are technology. So I decided to ask my coworkers on BuzzFeed’s tech team to show me how to dress like a tech employee, and this is what happened…”

The kick-ass women of ‘Sense8′ make it best new show on TV | Reel Girl: “Last night, after my husband and I finished watching the last episode of ‘Sense 8,’ I rushed to the computer, Googling the show to see when to expect season 2. Maybe never! Wait, what? According to Think Progress and other sources, the diverse show featuring eight characters from different countries around the world may not be appealing enough to white males. Main characters also include a trans woman and a gay man.”

This Ruling Could Change Online “Free Speech” Forever | The Daily Beast: [CW: online harassment] “The spirit of “free speech” is put above freedom from harassment, bullying, or shaming. And it’s having horrific results—leaving jobs, avoiding careers, even contemplating suicide. The response from abusers and apologists is to “grow a thicker skin.” That “this is the Internet.” But it’s not. It’s the Internet as abusers want it. We should change that.”

The World’s Most Popular Video Game Fights Racist Harassment With Artificial Intelligence | Tech.mic: “They built a system called the Tribunal, a public case log of files where players could review reported instances of racism, sexism and homophobia, then vote on whether or not they warranted action. After 100 million votes were cast, the team had a usable database of what their community considers an abusive behavior. Then, they turned over that knowledge to their machine-learning algorithm and set it to work dealing with instances of abuse.”

At Comic-Con, It Feels Like the Year of the Woman | NYTimes.com: “Quite a few panels reflected this variety and grappled with its implications. Nobody is suggesting that a utopian age of sexual and racial equality has dawned in San Diego or anywhere else. The default Comic-Con panelist is still a white man, but it does seem that more of an effort has been made to correct this lazy lopsidedness here than in, say, the Hollywood studios a few hours up the freeway. If the entertainment business is still dominated by interlocking old-boy networks — in the movie studios, the bigger comic-book publishers, the television networks and among the writers, artists and directors those entities employ — the audience is challenging that status quo.”

The Women Who Rule Pluto | The Atlantic: “For all the firsts coming out of the New Horizons mission—color footage of Pluto, photos of all five of its moons, and flowing datastreams about Pluto’s composition and atmosphere—there’s one milestone worth noting on Earth: This may be the mission with the most women in NASA history.”

Listening, Being Heard | E. Catherine Tobler: “Writers like Weir — male, white, on top of the NYT Bestseller lists, movie deals, a break out book — are in an amazing position to boost voices that are not like their own. They have the ability to lift others up. And time after time, they mention work that is exactly like their own. Authors who mirror their own selves”

The trouble with jokes about girls | Times Higher Education: “There are many aspects to this story, but I want here to focus on just one of them: whether construing a sexist comment as a joke changes how we evaluate it. I am not so much concerned with the specifics of this case but rather by a more general issue: the division between those, like me, who think that the “joke” status of a disparaging comment is irrelevant, and those who think that whether someone is joking or not is a game-changer.”

‘A national hero': psychologist who warned of torture collusion gets her due | Law | The Guardian: “Jean Maria Arrigo’s inbox is filling up with apologies. For a decade, colleagues of the 71-year-old psychologist ignored, derided and in some cases attacked Arrigo for sounding alarms that the American Psychological Association was implicated in US torture. But now that a devastating report has exposed deep APA complicity with brutal CIA and US military interrogations – and a smear campaign against Arrigo herself – her colleagues are expressing contrition.”

How to Deter Doxxing | Nieman Reports: “If I learned one thing from my ordeal it’s that doxxing can happen to anyone, at any time, for nearly any reason. But awareness of the risks—and effective strategies to mitigate them—too often come from bad experiences rather than preparation. When I was doxxed, the person who understood the most about what happened was the Domino’s delivery guy. As soon as Twitter was mentioned, he knew exactly what I was experiencing. Now it’s time for reporters and editors to know just as much.”

Read This Letter From Scientists Accusing Top Publisher Of Sexism | BuzzFeed News: “More than 600 scientists and their supporters have signed an open letter to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), criticizing four recent events that “hinder the advancement of underrepresented groups” in science, technology, engineering, and math. The letter asks AAAS to “work more diligently” to avoid “harmful stereotypes” when publishing content about minorities, and recommends that its editorial staff undergo diversity training.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Monday was the first day of Europython, and the first keynote was by Ola Sendecka & Ola Sitarska, the founders of Django Girls. They gave a wonderful talk leading us through their journey in creating the Django Girls tutorial, its viral-like spread in introducing over 1600 women worldwide to Python programming, leading to a Django Girls Foundation with a paid employee, and their plans to expand the tutorial to a book, Yay Python!. This was all illustrated with an incredibly charming squirrel-centred parable, hand-drawn by Sendecka. The two Olas are clearly a formidable team.

And yet. I had no less than three conversations with men later that day who told me they thought it was a great idea to encourage more women in Python, but…wasn’t it encouraging stereotypes? Was it good that Django Girls was so, well, girly?

There may be a well-meaning concern about avoiding stereotypes, but I wonder if there also wasn’t some underlying discomfort, about seeing something encouraging people in their field that didn’t speak to them. Could programming really look like this? Maybe it felt a bit like being a squirrel surrounded by badgers, in fact.

So firstly. Certainly pink can be a lazy shorthand for marketing to women. But anyone who watches the Olas’ keynote can be in no doubt that they have poured endless effort into their work. Their enthusiasm and attitude infuses every aspect of the tutorials. There’s no way it could be equated with a cynical marketing ploy.

Certainly pink things, sparkles and curly fonts have a reputation as being associated with girls. Here’s a question to blow your mind: is there anything bad about them, besides the fact that they are associated with girls?

Compulsory femininity, where girls and women are expected to act and look a certain way, is bad, yes. But femininity itself is not inherently weak, or silly, or frivolous, or bad.

Monospace white-on-black command-line aesthetic is a stylistic choice. It’s one that is relatively unmarked in our community. Glittery pastels is a different aesthetic. They are both perfectly valid ways to invite someone to be a programmer. And they will appeal to different audiences.

Most reasonable people these days would agree that demeaning or dismissing someone solely because she is female is socially unacceptable. However, demeaning or dismissing people for expressing feminine qualities is often condoned and even encouraged. Indeed, much of the sexism faced by women today targets their femininity (or assumed femininity) rather than their femaleness.

Demeaning feminine qualities is the flip side of androcentrism. Androcentrism is a society-wide pattern that celebrates masculine or male-associated traits, whatever the gender of the person with these traits. It’s part of the reason why women who succeed in male dominated fields are lauded, why those fields themselves are often overpaid. It’s how we find ourselves being the Cool Girl, who is Not Like Other Girls, an honorary guy.

It’s not a coincidence that people in our community rarely attend with a feminine presentation, for example, wearing dresses. Fitting in – looking like we belong – currently requires pants and a t-shirt. Wearing a dress is a lightning rod for double-takes, stares, condescension, being doubted, not being taken seriously.

To be explicit, this doesn’t mean that all women currently in tech are longing to femme it up. Many women are perfectly comfortable in a t-shirt and jeans. But implicitly expecting women to conform to that uniform is just as much a problem as expecting feminine attire. The problem is the lack of freedom to present and participate as our authentic selves.

Read these personal accounts and believe that this is how feminine women in tech get treated. They’re both hugely insightful.

Like Ola Sendecka, Sailor Mercury is a talented illustrator, as can be seen in her article. She ran a Kickstarter campaign to create her Bubblesort Zines (which you can now buy!). The overwhelming success of her Kickstarter (it reached its goal in 4 hours and eventually raised over US$60,000) speaks to an excitement and hunger for this style of work.

Inviting women into tech isn’t worth much if they have to leave their personality at the door to be accepted. Being supportive of diversity doesn’t mean much if you expect to look around and see things look basically the same. The existence of Django Girls does not compel all Pythonista women to femininity, but it does offer and even celebrate it as an option. If it’s not for you, so what? Take your discomfort as a starting point to figure out what you can do to make your community more welcoming for feminine people. Embrace femininity: Take a feminine person seriously today.

PS. If you’re still stuck back at “isn’t something only for girls (REVERSE) SEXIST?” – Read the FAQ.

The Geek Feminism blog’s Linkspam tradition started back in August 2009, in the very early days of the blog and by September it had occurred to us to take submissions through bookmarking services. From shortly after that point there were a sequence of scripts that pulled links out of RSS feeds. Last year, I began cleaning up my script and turning it into the one link-hoovering script to rule them all. It sucks links out of bookmarking sites, Twitter and WordPress sites and bundles them all up into an email that is sent to the linkspamming team there for curation, pre-formatted in HTML and with title and suggestion descriptions for each link. It even attempts to filter out links already posted in previous linkspams.

The Geek Feminism linkspammers aren’t the only link compilers in town, and it’s possible we’re not the only group who would find my script useful. I’ve therefore finished generalising it, and I’ve released it as Spam All the Links on Gitlab. It’s a Python 3 script that should run on most standard Python environments.

Spam All the Links

Spam All the Links is a command line script that fetches URL suggestions from
several sources and assembles them into one email. That email can in turn be
pasted into a blog entry or otherwise used to share the list of links.

Use case

Spam All the Links was written to assist in producing the Geek Feminism linkspam posts. It was developed to check WordPress comments, bookmarking websites such as Pinboard, and Twitter, for links tagged “geekfeminism”, assemble them into one email, and email them to an editor who could use the email as the basis for a blog post.

The script has been generalised to allow searches of RSS/Atom feeds, Twitter, and WordPress blog comments as specified by a configuration file.

Email output

The email output of the script has three components:

a plain text email with the list of links

a HTML email with the list of links

an attachment with the HTML formatted links but no surrounding text so as to be easily copy and pasted

All three parts of the email can be templated with Jinja2.

Sources of links

Spam All the Links currently can be configured to check multiple sources of links, in these forms:

RSS/Atom feeds, such as those produced by the bookmarking sites Pinboard or Diigo, where the link, title and description of the link can be derived from the equivalent fields in the RSS/Atom. (bookmarkfeed in the configuration file)

RSS/Atom feeds where links can be found in the ‘body’ of a post (postfeed in the configuration file)

Twitter searches (twitter in the configuration file)

comments on WordPress blog entries (wpcommentsfeed in the configuration file)

Everything You Know About Boys and Video Games Is Wrong | Time: “Kids I’ve worked with, both male and female, will put up with a lot to play exciting games. But it doesn’t mean they like the way women are portrayed. Yet the video game industry seems to base much of its game and character design on a few assumptions, among them that girls don’t play big action games, boys won’t play games with strong female characters, and male players like the sexual objectification of female characters.”

Tech’s Hottest Lunch Spot? A Strip Club | Forbes: “In a city that’s being gentrified by the engineers and startup employees, the Gold Club is perhaps the most outré illustration of San Francisco’s recent excesses, a place where curious crowds come for the cheap fare and stay for the alcohol and extracurriculars. It is also an example of how tone deaf many in the male-dominated tech industry can be.”

How Reddit shoved former CEO Ellen Pao off the glass cliff | The Daily Dot: “What is clear, however, is that like many women before her, Pao was tasked with finding solutions to difficult problems only for the men around her to avoid being blamed for them. While it stood to reason Pao would be targeted by the adolescents on the site, she probably would’ve appreciated a warning about the ones in the board room.”

Internet harassment and online threats targeting women: Research review | Journalist’s Resource: “As the totality and intensity of the harassment is being better understood, scholars have even begun to see this phenomenon as a profound civil rights issue for women and other groups such as racial minorities. Persistent threats can not only diminish well-being and cause psychological trauma but can undercut career prospects and the ability to function effectively in the marketplace and participate in democracy.”

The Mad Max Comics’ Half-Assed Female Characters | Vulture: “Lazy writers, when doing stories that feature women, are drawn magnetically to woman-denigrating plotlines because those are the ones so baked into the culture that they become easy. The Furiosa writers probably didn’t make the title character a brooding sexual-assault survivor because they wanted to take her down a peg; they did it because they couldn’t be bothered to do something more interesting. That is, of course, an extra disappointment because it runs so counter to the spirit of the movie. And it’s especially frustrating because it’s not a matter of bad storytelling, but a matter of a culture that condones and incentivizes bad stories. “

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Silence is Complicit. I’ll Speak Up Now. | evanbrown.io (July 7): “Don’t be complicit, don’t be a safe harbor. Call people out on the spot. Shine a big bright light every chance you get. Do other things, too. Find something concrete that you can contribute and let’s get to work on cleaning up the mess in our industry.”

CRISPR: Move beyond differences | Nature (June 24): “People at the conference quipped that this gendered divide reflected the following: men are pro-science and women are pro-ethics; men draw on rational criteria to support their arguments whereas women draw on emotional ones; men are interested in tangible, pragmatic issues whereas women are interested in values and deep ethical thought.
All of these ideas are reductive and sexist. They fail to recognize that people — whatever their gender, race or class — generally focus on pragmatic and measurable solutions to the problems they find the most pressing. People just differ on which issues they think are the most important.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Gold Standard | Popular Science: “So don’t write to me saying I don’t care about science because a poor guy tarnished his own gold star by making a bad, sexist joke and got called out on it. Instead, ask yourself how much you care about science that you’ve allowed the past to supersede the future. Take a long look at the choices that led you to put science before people. Instead of blindly defending an old man with a medal, try to listen and reflect upon yourself and the society that led you to defend him in the first place.”

What to do if a woman is funny on twitter | Amelia Greenhall: “You have just been sent this link because you explained a woman’s joke to her on Twitter! Or maybe you made her own joke back to her, except not as funny, or derailed her joke by talking about something else, or something similarly well-intentioned but cringeworthy. Whatever the case, we must regretfully inform you that you have almost certainly made her feel insulted, bored, annoyed and/or angry. This is probably not what you wanted.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

This is another round of Geek feminism classifieds. If you’re looking to hire women, find some people to participate in your study, find female speakers, or just want some like-minded folk to join your open source project, this is the thread for you!

Here’s how it works:

Geeky subjects only. We take a wide view of geekdom, but if your thing isn’t related to an obviously geeky topic, you’ll probably want to give a bit of background on why the readers of Geek Feminism would be interested.

Explain what you’re looking for. Even if it’s not a job ad, think of it like one: what is the activity/role in question, and what would it involve? What is the profile of people you’re looking for?

GF has international readership, so please be sure to indicate the location if you’re advertising a job position, conference, or other thing where the location matters. Remember that city acronyms aren’t always known world-wide and lots of cities share names, so be as clear as possible! (That is, don’t say “SF[O]” or “NYC” or “Melb”, say “San Francisco, USA”, “New York City, USA” or “Melbourne, Australia”.) And if you can provide travel/relocation assistance, we’d love to know about it.

Keep it legal. Most jurisdictions do not allow you to (eg.) advertise jobs for only people of a given gender. So don’t do that. If you are advertising for something that falls into this category, think of this as an opportunity to boost the signal to women who might be interested.

Provide a way for people to contact you, such as your email address or a link to apply in the case of job advertisements. (The email addresses entered in the comment form here are not public, so readers won’t see them.)

Keep an eye on comments here, in case people ask for clarification or more details. (You can subscribe to comments via email or RSS.)

If you’d like some more background/tips on how to reach out to women for your project/event/whatever, take a look at Recruiting women on the Geek Feminism Wiki.)